Peltekis.dev

I Tried Gentoo Linux (It Didn’t Go Well)

September 28, 2025

Like many Linux enthusiasts, I’ve always heard stories about Gentoo—the legendary distribution where you compile everything from source and “learn the inner workings of Linux.” Some say it’s the ultimate rite of passage, others say it’s a masochistic hobby. I wanted to find out for myself.

Why Gentoo?

I’ve daily-driven Arch, Debian (which is still my daily driver), and many more distros. Gentoo felt like the next frontier. The promise of a system fully optimized for my hardware, with total control over what gets installed and how, sounded appealing. Plus, I thought it would be a fun weekend project.

The Installation Process

The official handbook is actually great. It walks you through everything, step by step. But here’s the catch: those steps are long.


# Partitioning

fdisk /dev/sda

# Mounting root

mount /dev/sda3 /mnt/gentoo

# Chrooting

chroot /mnt/gentoo /bin/bash

By the time I got to the kernel configuration, I realized: I don’t know nearly enough about which drivers I actually need.


# Kernel configuration menu

make menuconfig

Inside this menu I was greeted with hundreds of options like:

[*] Enable support for obscure chipset no one has ever heard of
[ ] Experimental PCI-E power management thing

How am I supposed to know what half of these mean?

Compiling Everything

I expected long compile times, but nothing prepares you for the reality of watching Firefox build for hours.

emerge --ask www-client/firefox

Output:

> > > Emerging (45 of 123) dev-lang/rust-1.x.x
> > > ...
> > > [8:42:11] Compiling some_crazy_dependency v0.0.1337
> > >

At this point, my laptop sounded like it was training a rocket engine.

The Breaking Point

I hit my wall with a simple goal: installing a desktop environment.

emerge --ask kde-plasma/plasma-meta

Result?

!!! The following packages require different USE flags:

-   kde-frameworks/some-library
-   qt-core/something-else

Translation: “You misconfigured something two hours ago, now you get to recompile half your system.”
I just wanted a desktop.

What I Learned

Even though I bailed, it wasn’t a total loss:

  • I now understand how much work package maintainers save us in other distros.
  • I got a glimpse of how Linux is truly put together at a low level.
  • Gentoo isn’t impossible, but it demands time, patience, and hardware better suited for marathon compiling sessions.

Gentoo isn’t bad—it’s just not for me (at least not right now). If you enjoy tinkering endlessly, love fine-tuned control, and have a powerful machine, Gentoo might be your playground.

But if you just want a working system without turning your weekend into a compilation fest, you’ll probably want to stick with something like Arch, Fedora, or Debian.